How to be a successful landlord

So I’ve written before about how I use Google Voiceto mess with SasquatchWells Fargo. Well there’s an even better use for this great service and it has to do with record keeping. More and more these days some of my tenants feel the need to send me text messages for things like maintenance requests and general questions. Normally this would not work for me due to the fact that I would need to transcribe the text messages from my cell phone to some form of log so I could keep a record of the conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another one of our posts written for Allstate’s Good Hands℠ Community on how to cover yourself and save expenses between tenants. The title is How To Minimize Costs and Time To Market Between Tenants. The post is about what steps to take to be sure that your turnaround time between tenants is fast and efficient. Remember, if your rentals are mortgaged, the goal is to have your tenants to pay the mortgage, not you the landlord. Thanks again to Allstate for this opportunity to contribute to their excellent Good Hands℠ Community.

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A while back Allstate Insurance approached us to do some writing for them on the blog attached to their Good Hands℠ Community forums. We are truly honored and excited to be able to share our knowledge with their users on the subject of personal finance and being a landlord in general. You can check out their community here and read our first post entitled “How to Find and Keep Good Tenants.”

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So recently, I had a tenant who had just moved to the area and wanted a 6-month lease.Normally I don’t accept 6-month leases but she said she would pre-pay the entire lease including the security deposit and I accepted. A month before the lease came up for renewal, I spoke with the tenant about renewing and sounded very positive about signing a new 1-year lease. She even went so far as to request that I send the lease for her to sign.

The next phone message I got from her 2 days later, was that she had moved to another house with about 25 days left on her lease. Talk about flaky. I should also mention that she placed this call on a public holiday when she knew she wouldn’t have to talk to me directly. Now that’s what I call flaky AND cowardly. Read the rest of this entry »

So, Landlord-Success.com is five years-old today. I would like to say thanks to all the readers of this blog, even the disgruntled ones. You know, the ones who feel the need to post ranting comments with bad spelling and atrocious grammar? Oh that’s right. I don’t publish those comments as I like to maintain some semblance of a good user experience here.

I would also like to thank the mortgage companies who, because of their bad behavior and mistreatment of their clients, make for oodles of content and occasionally a firestorm of comments. I swear, you couldn’t manufacture worse stories and by the way, the mortgage companies standard response is, “Well, you signed a contract…” Those responses DO get published here. They’ve threatened us, sent “cease and desist” emails to us and yet…….we’re 5 years-old today!

We intend to be around for at least 5 more years so please, keep reading. As long as mortgage companies and tenants misbehave, you’ll see it here. You should also see stories about good behavior too but the bad behavior is more fun to read because chances are we’ve all experienced it.